Gerald and Sara Murphy

Gerald Clery Murphy and Sara Sherman Wiborg were wealthy, expatriate Americans who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation.

Gerald Clery Murphy (March 26, 1888 – October 17, 1964) was born in Boston to the family that owned the Mark Cross Company, sellers of fine leather goods.

[1]: 237  He befriended a young freshman named Cole Porter (Yale class of 1913) and brought him into Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Her father, Frank Bestow Wiborg, was a manufacturing chemist and owner of his own printing ink and varnish company; he was a self-made millionaire by the age of 40.

Raised in Cincinnati, she moved with her family to Germany for several years when she was a teenager so her father could concentrate on the European expansion of his company.

Upon returning to the United States, the Wiborgs spent most of their time in New York City and later East Hampton, where they built the 30-room mansion The Dunes on 600 acres just west of the Maidstone Club in 1912.

Eventually they moved to the French Riviera, where they became the center of a large circle of artists and writers of later fame, especially Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Archibald MacLeish, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

They took him to Switzerland and then returned to the U.S. in 1934, where Gerald stayed in Manhattan to run Mark Cross, serving as president of the company from 1934 to 1956; he never painted again.

Sara settled in Saranac Lake, New York, to nurse Patrick, and Baoth and Honoria were put in boarding schools.

By 1941, the house proved impossible to rent, sell, or even maintain; the Murphys had it demolished, and they moved to the renovated dairy barn.

Ernest Hemingway's couple in The Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities of the setting (Nice) and of the type of social group portrayed, there is clearly some basis for such an assumption.